"A large part of the ambience, which permeates the album, is due to the fact that it was recorded using the Zuccarelli Holophonic technology, similar to the Artificial Head system used by the 70's Berlin Krautrockers. Extra spacial dimension and clarity become disorientatingly apparent. This encouraged Psychic TV to record sounds and environments which would make the most of the recording system. Locations included The Hell Fire Club caves 300ft. underground, Christ Church in Hampstead, and Caxton Hall. The album is full of sounds designed to exploit the 3D effect" (Genesis P-Orridge)

The pros & cons of holophonic recording have been endlessly debated, but it results in a pretty amazing headphone listen.

GPO: This guy called Hugo Zuccarelli invented this special new way of recording sound. Part of it was a real human skull, with latex skin and real human hair, called “Ringo” cause it was the skull of a Mexican boxer called Ringo who died in the ring. Which is... interesting. Not really useful to the sound, [laughter] but... inside that, he had little bags of liquid where the inner ear is, so he tried to construct as near as he could an entire person’s head with a sack of liquid for the brain, and so on. And right in the center of that was something, which he wouldn’t tell, and he hid the papers all over the world, which went through a wire and into a black box. And in the black box, the digital information from this whatever, was changed back into code that could become sound again.

EC: Analog?

GPO: No, this was digital, three-dimensional digital, it was the first time ever it had been done. Pink Floyd used it on... Meddle, maybe?

EC: Did you need a special player to understand this?

GPO: Oh yeah, when we used it, Sony brought an entire mobile studio they built specially, and the tape was circular but it was twice this diameter.

AW: That has gotta be mega-expensive.

GPO: Well, they did it for free, because they’d been trying to get people to do it on a whole album and no one else would. Pink Floyd used it for sound effects only, and Michael Jackson used it on Thriller but only for the sound effects, and we said we’ll use [it] for the whole fucking album. So they created this whole studio for us, at this place called Jacob’s.

We tried all these things — we put the head in a coffin, buried it, so you can hear yourself being buried alive, on the record, and we got this guy from a film studio to come with a license and fire guns past its ears so you could hear bullets flying past... all kinds of stuff. We did a tattoo on it [laughter]. We got clippers and pretended to cut its hair, we put it on a rope and swung him so he was flying around the studio while we played live, so it was recording wherever it went.

We went into the Hell Fire Club caves, because Zuccarelli reckoned it would pick up atmosphere as well; we recorded in the place where Aleister Crowley did his Rites of Eleusis and gave out magic mushrooms; we recorded in a church with an opera singer. This choir, they were actually singing Kraft-Ebbing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis,” so if you translated the Latin it was actually about a woman who had a perversion about young boys. It was wild, we couldn’t believe our luck. And the more ridiculous the things we suggested, the more they’d go, “Yeah, that sounds great, we’ll organize it for you.” [Laughter].

I can't remember what his album is called but it is my favourite album for listening to while walking around by myself. Especially if it's a bit dark and cold and I'm in a bad mood, then it's the perfect soundtrack.

...to composing, recording, playing(?) mixing that album being brought down to *it's great for reading when on the bus*. And I don't mean that as having a go at you film_maker, it's just quite a funny thought. The life of a musician eh?

It zooms around your head, and breaks and stops and blurps and walls of sound fizz up and down.

Pitchshifter - www.pitchshifter.comAs a teen I was obsessed with the L-R panning on this album, and the odd little tricks where sounds seemed to rise and fall.

The National - Boxer
As a fan, I find the production odd unless the records are cranked right up in my headphones. More like a duvet than a wall of sound. Especially good in the rain or slightly drunk on the tube.

Liars - They Threw Us in a Trench...
Best drunk on a nightbus album, probably.

...probably some much better records in terms of production but those are the ones that listening to them on headphones seems to take the listening experience to another - more memorable - level.

Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden/Laughing Stock pretty much demand to be listened to on headphones. The even-more-hushed Mark Hollis solo album too.

Any of the Pink Floyd albums between Meddle and Animals - the point in their career when they were playing most with textures and layers. While 'The Wall' didn't throw this out of the window entirely, I'd say it's much more of a hi-fi album.

Villalobos, dude. hero. Basic Channel blew the doors off the hinges and turned the inside out, but RV has taken techno even further away from its more simplistic electro roots. and yet no matter how fiddly and minimal his music gets, there's always an insistant groove.

But I think he's a fucking genuis. One of the greatest artists of the past decade. Alcachofa, Au Harem, Achso, Vasco (Minimoonstar!), his Fabric production, his more recent work with Loedebour (sic) and not forgetting all his amazing remixes (Blood on my Hands 20 min is one of my favorite electronic peices ever).

He takes the bass of house, and more recently techno, i.e that 4x4 beat with some sort of groove but just fucking takes it to it's literal extreme of what's possible in that music. I guess the obvious comparison is with improvised jazz music, but I swear down it's much more rooted in modern classical composition. The way he blends certain sounds and intricate details with elements of chance all over that base structure. If he was born 50 years earlier he'd be a serialist and I'm generally not trying to be pretentious. God this is such 3am talk.

His most accesible (compared to later stuff) and one of his best. Resident Advisor voted it the greatest album of the 00s so it's got some respect behind it.

From there I'd either go to his next album Au Harem or jump to his Fabric mix (all his own productions). And then just explore. He's got such a bit singles and remix collection that you kind of just have to explore.